Part 12 (1/2)
She lowered the weapon and rested her nerves Then she quietly lifted the gun again And the fourth bullet knocked the can spinning fro
The man shouted his approval, and her flushed face shohat a real triu accomplishments she had valued more Yet it caused no self-wonder; she only knew that she respected and prized the good opinion of this staloodsman, and by this one little act she had proved to hi quality of her nerves
And it was no little triu,--to throw the whole force of the nervous syste It was the same precept that rasped it so quickly was a guaranty of her ownmen feel when they prove, for their own eyes alone, their self-worth
It was the instinct that sends the self-indulgent businessto his work in a limousine, into the depths of the dreadful wilderness to hunt, and that urges the tenderfoot to clihest peaks
It did not mean that she was a dead shot already Months and years of practice are necessary to obtain full mastery of pistol or rifle She had simply made a most creditable start There would be plenty of misses thereafter; in fact, the next six shots she ht control, how to gauge distance and wind and the speed of ht road to success
While Virginia cooked lunch, Bill cut young spruce trees and h the whirling snow to being in the remainder of the e the sled up the ridge and then draw it holy during the night, and he came none too soon It was only a matter of days, perhaps of hours, before the snoould be impassable except with snowshoes Until at last the snowfall ceased and packed, traveling even with their aid would be a heart-breaking business
Virginia was lonely and depressed all the time Bill was absent, and she had a htened up at his return But it was a natural development: the snoilds were dreary indeed for a lonely soul He was a fellow huh
”You can call inia, if you want to,” she told him ”Last names are silly out here--Heaven knoe can't keep them up in these weeks to coht we crossed the river”
Bill looked his gratitude, and she helped hi just outside the cabin door; one of the great hams suspended in a spruce tree, fifty feet in front of the cabin The skin was fleshed and hung up behind the stove to dry
”It's going to furnish the web of our snowshoes,” he explained
That night their talk took a philosophical trend, and in the candlelight he told her some of his most secret views She found that the North, the untamed land that had been his home, had colored all his ideas, yet she was ae of some subjects
Far from the influence of any church, she was surprised to find that he was a religious ion went deeper than her own She belonged to one of the Protestant churches of Christianity, attended church regularly, and the church had given her fine ideals and ion itself was not a reality to her It was not a deep urge, an inner and profound passion as it ith him She prayed in church, she had always prayed--half auto prayer to a literal God had been outside her born of thought In her sheltered life she had never felt the need of a literal God The spirit of All Being was not close to her, as it was to hiion in the wilderness, and it was real He had listened to the voices of the wind and the stir of the waters in the fretful lake; he had caught dih to flood his heart with passion, in the rustling of the leaves, the utter silence of the night, the unearthly beauty of the far ranges, stretching one upon another His was an austere God, infinitely just and wise, but His great airasp
Most of all, his was a God of strength, of hty passions and ht, and the nights that followed, she absorbed--a little at a time--his most harboured ideas of life and nature He did not speak freely, but she drew him out with sympathetic interest But for all he knew life in the raw and the gloom of the spruce forest, his outlook had not been darkened For all his long acquaintance with a stark and remorseless Nature, he remained an optimist
None of his views surprised her as much as this He knew the snows and the cold, this le and pain of life, yet he held no rancor ”It's all part of the game,” he explained ”It's some sort of a test, a preparation--and there's sos to see, behind it”
He believed in a hereafter He thought that the very hardshi+p of life made it necessary Earthly existence could not be an end in itself, he thought: rather the tuthened the soul for soo on,” he told her earnestly ”And some of us fall--and stop”
”But life isn't so hard,” she answered ”I've never known hardshi+p or trial I know irls that don't knohat it inia, those people will go out of life as soft, as unprepared, as when they came in They will be as helpless as when they left their mother's wombs They haven't been disciplined
They haven't known pain and work and battle--and the strengthening they entail They don't live a natural life Nature le Because ofan artificial existence, and they pay for it in the end Nature's way is one of hardshi+p”
This entle, kindly Nature She was no friend of his He knew her as a siren, a reat secret aims that no hted the way for hunting creatures to find and rend their prey
The snow trapped the deer in the valleys where the wolf pack rouse in the shrubbery; the wind sang a song of death He pointed out that all the wilderness voices expressed the pain of living,--the sobbing utterance of the coyotes, the song of the wolves in the winter snow, the wail of the geese in their southern rations
In these talks she was surprised to learn how full had been his reading
All through her girlhood she had gone to private schools and had been tutored by high-paid intellectual aristocrats, yet she found this man better educated than herself He had read philosophy and had browsed, at least, a all the literature of the past; he knew history and a certain measure of science, and hly developed so that he could see into the s hts he told her Nature lore, the ways of the living-creatures that he observed, and in the daytime he illustrated his points froh the stor slowly because of the depth of the drifts, and under his tutelage, the wild life began to reveal to her its rouse with her pistol; once a great long-pinioned goose, resting on the shore of frozen Gray Lake, fell to her aim She saw the animals in the marshes, the herds of caribou that are, above all creatures, natives and habitants of the snoept mountains, the little, lesser hunters such as ht they heard the wolf pack chanting as they ran along the ridge
Life was real up here The superficialities hich she had dealt before were revealed in their true light Of all the past material requisites, only three remained,--food and warmth and shelter Others that she did not think she needed--protection, and strength and discipline--were shown as vitally necessary Co hand in ashe lacked noas ive love For years she had poured her adoration upon Harold, lost it too, reciprocally; and this she th for the war of life, even a tre difficulties
The snow fell almost incessantly and the tree limbs could hold no more